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Recent Past Exhibitions

The Hunter College Art Galleries and The Muse Scholar Programhave organized a screening program of ART21 Presents William Kentridge: Six Drawing Lessons. The six lectures will be screened continuously during normal gallery hours on individual monitors, as well as projected. The gallery is encouraging faculty to bring their classes to the exhibition. To schedule a class viewing, please contact Annie Wischmeyer at awischme@hunter.cuny.edu.

In 2012, William Kentridge—the Johannesburg-born artist whose creations have been celebrated for their direct engagement with political and social issues—was selected by an esteemed panel to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. Six Drawing Lessons were the resulting lectures he presented that spring at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center. ART21, the award-winning nonprofit producers of Art in the Twenty-First Century, has distributed Six Drawing Lessons,each of which spans a wide range of ideas and includes vivid examples of Kentridge’s works.

Sound Works examines the importance of sound in the work of William Anastasi (b. 1933), one of the key figures in the development of Conceptual, Process, and Minimal Art. Since the early 1960s sound has played a central role in Anastasi’s relentless investigations into the status, autonomy, and representational function of the art object. Bringing together works from 1963 to the present, Sound Works marks the first comprehensive exhibition to focus exclusively on William Anastasi’s varied use of and engagement with sound. By showcasing sound as a consistent thread in his pioneering efforts to question aesthetic norms, this exhibition provides a unique lens through which to consider Anastasi’s artistic innovations and contributes to the ongoing critical reappraisal of his oeuvre.

This ensemble of objects and drawings explores the complex relationship between sound and image, and yields a range of conceptual and phenomenological tensions: between active and passive, presence and absence, creation and destruction. In so doing, Anastasi raises important questions about site and medium specificity, the dematerialization of the aesthetic object, and the dynamic nature of sense experience and perception. Cumulatively, Sound Works offers visitors an unprecedented opportunity to consider both the importance of sound to Anastasi’s broader artistic practice as well as Anastasi’s significance to the emerging art movements of the 1960s and beyond.

William Anastasi: Sound Works, 1963–2013 opens at a pivotal moment in the artist’s career—in the year of his eightieth birthday— and coincides with a resurgence of interest in sound based art. This unique timing opens the door for critical discussion of the development of sound art and Anastasi’s pivotal role in its history.

This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of: Agnes Gund, Dorothy Lichtenstein, The Straus Family Fund, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, and an anonymous donor.

Eco’s concept of the Open Work—an artwork that could not be completed without the viewer’s participation—was highly useful for Latin American conceptualists from the late 1960s through the late 1970s because it named the collaborative and performative emphasis of their artworks. Open Work in Latin America, New York & Beyond: Conceptualism Reconsidered, 1967–1978 displays the capacious nature of conceptualism by exhibiting 91 books, video, sound works, prints, drawings, installations and photography by 36 artists working in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, New York, London, Los Angeles, Montevideo and Caracas. Although not a historical survey, the show presents a collective desire to use the body to destabilize systems of representation shared by artists from Latin America working in conceptual modes from 1967 to 1978.

Open Work in Latin America, New York and Beyond includes some ninety works that have been generously lent to Hunter College from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard University, Henrique Faria Fine Art, Document Art Gallery, Alexander Gray Associates, Daros Latinamerica Collection, Thria Collection, Luis Camnitzer, Jaime Davidovich, and Liliana Porter.

Hunter College is deeply grateful to the following donors, whose generous support has made this exhibition possible, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and The Bershad Exhibition Fund.

For more information about related events, including lectures by Dan Quiles, Gabriela Rangel, and performances and screenings organized by students at Hunter College, and for information about Hunter College’s Department of Art and Art History and its initiatives supported by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, go to: www.latinamericanartathunter.org

Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions 1966 - 2013 celebrates the work of Sanford Wurmfeld, the Phyllis and Joseph Caroff Professor of Fine Arts Emeritus and the Hunter College Art Department Chair from 1978-2006. Wurmfeld is an internationally known painter and a fixture in the New York art world. For decades he has created abstract paintings about color and its affects on human mood and visual perception. Drawing inspiration from Georges Seurat, Josef Albers, Claude Monet, Mark Rothko, and his mentors and colleagues from Hunter College, among others, Sanford Wurmfeld illustrates the psychological effects of color on large-scale canvases. He has pursued a near-scientific inquiry into the perceptual and experiential effects of color while remaining an intuitive painter. With over 60 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and films – many of which have never been exhibited – Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions 1966 - 2013 presents the most comprehensive retrospective of his large-scale works from over his fifty-year career. The exhibition provides a unique opportunity to explore Wurmfeld’s groundbreaking examination of three-dimensional color as well as his legacy as a painter.

Hunter College is deeply grateful to the leadership support from the following exhibition sponsors: The President’s Office, Hunter College; The Bershad Exhibition Fund; The Evelyn Kranes Kossak Painting Fund; and The Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Foundation. We thank, for their major contributions, Phyllis and Joseph Caroff, Lucille D. & Theodore Kaufman, Golden Artist Colors, Inc., New Berlin, NY, Phyllis L. Kossoff, John Leubsdorf, Joan Masket and Sherman Pincus, Jacqueline J. Sferra Rada, Anita Shapolsky, and the Judith and Stanley Zabar Fund. We are also grateful for the many generous gifts to the exhibition from Sandy Wurmfeld’s former students, colleagues, friends and family, including those who contributed through our Facebook campaign.

Patti Smith: 9.11 Babelogue

On view at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery at Hunter College

September 8-December 3, 2011

The Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to present Patti Smith: 9.11 Babelogue. This exhibition was on view from September 8-December 3, 2011, and comprised some twenty-six works on paper by the esteemed poet, performer, and visual artist Patti Smith as a response to the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001. The artist’s elegiac homage does not align the Twin Towers with one nation, religion, or race, but instead offers them as symbols of the universal resiliency of the human spirit. Smith’s “9.11” series was created between 2001 and 2002 and will be shown in its entirety for the first time in New York, in the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, coincided with the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The Hunter College Art Galleries were honored to share this timely exhibition with the Hunter Community and the City of New York.

Patti Smith, equal parts writer, performer, and visual artist, has been a pivotal figure on the downtown New York art and music scene since the late 1960s. Her transformative words and uncompromising commitment to art has inspired subsequent generations of musicians, writers, and artists. Smith’s work has been extensively exhibited in solo exhibitions internationally including Land 250 exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2008 and her upcoming exhibition Camera Solo at the Wadsworth Antheneum in Hartford, CT in October of 2011. She is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Musée National d’art Moderne, Centre Georges Pomipidou, Paris, among others. The artist has been widely recognized for her multifaceted accomplishments. Smith was the recipient of the 2010 National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids, and has also been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded her the Commandeur des Arts et Letttres, France’s highest honor for contributions to the arts and culture. Most recently, the artist was awarded the Polar Music Prize by the Stig Anderson Music Award Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden.

The Hunter College Art Galleries, under the auspices of the Department of Art and Art History, has been a vital aspect of the New York cultural landscape since its inception over a quarter-century ago. This exhibition, titled Patti Smith. 9.11 Babelogue, organized by Michelle Yun, Curator of the Hunter College Art Galleries, underscored the galleries’ unique ability to share the highest levels of academic scholarship and curatorial connoisseurship with the general public, thus facilitating a dynamic cultural exchange.

Patti Smith. 9.11 Babelogue was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue that included writings by Patti Smith; a forward by Dr. Joachim Pissarro, Bershad Professor of Art History and Director of the Hunter College Art Galleries and a critical essay by Michelle Yun.

This exhibition was made possible with the support of the Hunter College Art Galleries Fund in collaboration with YoungArts, the core program of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. Additional funding provided by Morris and Wendy Evans of the Richard and Rebecca Evans Foundation.

With Glasgow at its heart, Scotland has, over the past twenty-five years, developed into one of the world’s most influential and imaginative centers of artistic production. New generations of artists continue to emerge from this unique city’s cultural rebirth, and the country’s transformation into a vital creative nexus.

This exhibition brought together the work of an extraordinary group of artists from Scotland and contextualizes their various aesthetic and conceptual concerns within the wider social and civic legacies of their environment.

While each artist has a purely individual approach, as a group they display the threads of a spiritual kinship, an elemental sensibility that invokes aspects of Glasgow’s manufacturing and municipal history, as well as its cultural and fiscal renaissance. The work evinces a considered, material restraint coupled with a profound intellectual commitment. These common characteristics are deepened by a workmanlike intensity to the craft of art-making that lends gravitas and substance to the process as much as to the finished work, resulting in often exquisite and evocative realizations of urban or human experience.

One of the largest exhibitions of contemporary art from Scotland ever seen in the United States, Industrial Aesthetics: Environmental Influences on Recent Art from Scotland presented a collection of works forged from a unique set of circumstances. The participating artists are the originators and caretakers of a dynamic and inventive art scene that echoes ideals of social organization and communal action—hallmarks of Glasgow’s political and commercial history.

Glasgow’s industrial base was once the reason for its status as the “Workshop of the Empire.” While today the empire is long gone, the workshop remains. These artists are creative heirs to the city’s specific cultural and economic developments, and to Scotland’s alternately illustrious, resilient, and ongoing evolution.

Industrial Aesthetics: Environmental Influences on Recent Art from Scotland was curated by Darren Jones (Hunter College MFA ’09) and was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue that included a foreword by Dr. Joachim Pissarro, Bershad Professor of Art History and Director of the Hunter College Art Galleries, critical essays by David Harding and Darren Jones, and an interview with Sam Ainsley. This exhibition was made possible with the support of the Hunter College Art Galleries Fund in collaboration with YoungArts, the core program of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. Additional Funding provided by the Ruth Stanton Foundation, Madina Stepanchenko/Phenomena Project, The Foundation To-Life and an anonymous donor.